Thursday, January 19, 2012

This past Christmas West Virginia artists were invited to make ornaments for the Governor's mansion Christmas tree. I chose to do a caricature in tribute to WV Senator Robert C. Byrd, who died in 2010. I decided it would be fitting to portray him as a cardinal, given that it's our state bird (and because of his last name, of course.)

Byrd was both the longest serving senator and longest serving member of congress in the history of the US. He was beloved in our state because as a powerful government figure he always made sure that WV was not forgotten when it came to government funding or other national issues. If you visit the state this is pretty obvious, as there are tons of buildings, roads, and other landmarks named after him. I attended his public funeral service at the state capitol grounds where I was lucky enough to hear Presidents Obama and Clinton give speeches.

Here's the original drawing I did to use as a guide when making the ornament from wood:

And here's the ornament hanging on the Governor's tree:

This was a great project that I was honored to be a part of, and it's really cool knowing that the ornament will be used for years to come.

Monday, January 16, 2012

I want to thank everybody for the great response I've gotten to my pieces for the Adult Swim show, I've had a lot of people reach out to me and it's really been amazing. The photo above was taken by Jonathan Bilski; I really appreciate him sending it along!

One thing I've been asked about quite a bit is prints. It was a bit of a last minute rush followed by a post office delivery miracle, but I was in fact able to get signed editions of the Birdgirl and Venture Bros pieces to the gallery by opening night. So for anybody who is interested you can buy those at the gallery's site:

Friday, January 13, 2012

My final piece for the Adult Swim show that opens tonight at Gallery 1988. When I got invited to this show I knew I had to do a Space Ghost piece. Even though it existed long before Adult Swim, it planted the seed for the late night block of adult-audience cartoons to show up years later.

I started watching Space Ghost: Coast to Coast from the very beginning. I was in 5th grade when it started airing, and my best friend at the time would come over on Friday nights and we'd stay up until 11:00 to watch Space Ghost and laugh our heads off. Watching the shows now, it's really interesting to me that I was so into it as a kid. For lack of a more elaborate description, it's just so...strange. It's full of that surreal and random comedy that's just about everywhere now, but at the time there was nothing else even close to it on TV.

I could be wrong, but I really think it spearheaded the current trend of what I call "random" comedy, although I think some shows today take the idea a bit too far. It seems to be a popular opinion these days to hate Family Guy because most of its jokes are unrelated cutaways, but at least they're creative and funny inside those self-contained bubbles. What bugs me with shows now is that it seems there is no creativity put into the jokes at all, they're just a series of random crap that could have been selected by throwing darts. "Uh, lets have a fat guy dressed as a woman, and he goes to an old folks home, but he has a novelty sized salt shaker with a raccoon inside that he's trying to get rid of. Comic genius!"

My best friend and I were the only people I knew of who watched Space Ghost. Between that and the show's premise that you were being patched into a feed from the Ghost Planet by a group of cartoon characters who barely knew how to run their own show, it really felt like you were watching it by accident. You felt like you were seeing something that nobody else knew about and it was awesome. It's very much the same feeling I think most people of my generation had when they discovered Adult Swim for the first time. You probably woke up late one night, unable to get back to sleep, and turned the TV on only to see a milkshake spouting nonsense to a ball of meat. That sense of stumbling upon something really gives a show an underground feel and makes you feel special for having "discovered' it, and to me Space Ghost was the epitome of that feeling.

So I have some great memories of the show. It's something nostalgic for me that unlike, say, Mario Bros or Ninja Turtles, kinda felt like it was my own thing rather than a huge phenomenon.

As for this drawing, there wasn't too much to the idea other than wanting to see the talk show set from a different perspective so that it seemed familiar and yet different. I also wanted to hide a lot of little references here and there, and I think I did a better job of it in this piece than some I've done in the past.

While doing some visual research for this piece I came across this old ad, which I included in the drawing itself:

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

My second piece for Gallery 1988's Adult Swim show. I figured there would be no shortage of Venture Bros drawings but I just couldn't resist.

This started out with only Brock and Molotov because I thought it would be fun to contrast and exaggerate their relative sizes, but as usual I couldn't help myself and I tinkered with it until I had added in some more characters. I really wanted to play up the modern style in this one because, as you can tell from a lot of my work, it's a look that I really love and it's also used on the show quite a bit. I think it would be a lot of fun to wander around the Venture compound...

Friday, January 6, 2012

One of my pieces for the Adult Swim show that opens at this month at
Gallery 1988 in LA. I am extremely excited to be a part of this show;
it's a dream come true to be involved in something officially sponsored
by Adult Swim.

I actually did this Birdgirl pin-up years ago and it immediately came to
my mind when I was thinking of pieces I could do. (Birdgirl is from the
amazing show Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law) When I went back
and looked at it, though, it was really obvious that my style had grown and
improved quite a bit since I had done that piece. In other words, I
felt like it looked too bad to submit. So I reworked it quite a bit and,
hopefully, improved it with this new version. I also came up with the
calender idea which I thought would be really cool since I could add
some other characters in the form of doodles that Harvey had added.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

My newest T-shirt design which you can vote on here. It's an old-timey version of the world map from Super Mario World. It was a lot of work but a lot of fun; I really get into stuff with somewhat tedious detail work like this from time to time.

Working on this also took me back to when I was a kid and I really enjoyed going through all the extra materials that came with video games like the boxes and manuals. I used to sit and draw out maps like this for individual levels which I thought was just as much fun as actually playing the game.

I'm thinking this would make a good poster too. Please click on the image to get a much larger and detailed view.